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Make China spend more?

Why don’t we make the bad guys bleed money for a change? That’s the strategic insight that helped us win the Cold War, and it seems especially timely today as the nation wobbles back – we hope – from the brink of yet another budget crisis.

“All four of those witnesses [said] we need to be sure we go back to competitive strategies,” Forbes told me. What does that mean? “Causing our potential competitors to spend money, and not in the areas they want.”

That’s what the US did to the Soviets when it developed stealth aircraft that forced Moscow to question its massive investment in anti-aircraft systems. Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative likewise threatened to neutralize the Soviet missile arsenal, forcing them to scramble for expensive countermeasures, even though we never managed to build it. The influential Center for Strategy and Budgetary Assessments calls these “cost-imposing strategies,” where every dollar you spend in the arms race makes the other side spend two dollars or more.

The first step, of course, is to stop bleeding money ourselves. “When you’re continuing the spiral of cuts downward, I think it sends an enormous message, a negative message, to our allies and to our competitors,” Forbes said....

There is more.

It is an interesting strategy, but I doubt the Obama administration would buy into it. They seem more intent on weakening our defense.

Jerusalem Post:
Russian forces blew up bridges on the Euphrates river held by Iranian militias several days ago, according to a report. This is the first time the Russians attacked Iranian targets in Syria.

The information came from a senior Syrian official who refused to be identified, and was reported in Bas News, a Kurdish news website.
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This would certainly put the Iranian operations in Syria at risk. The story does not indicate what prompted the attack. Israel has been making it clear to Syria and to Russia that it would not tolerate Iranian forces in Syria it deemed a threat to its security.

Just across the border from the U.S., drug gangs slaughtered 23 people — hanging nine from a bridge and decapitating 14 more, whose heads were found stashed in coolers near the town hall.

The four men and five women discovered dangling from the Colosio Bridge in Nuevo Laredo were handcuffed, blindfolded and bore signs of torture.

A banner hanging from the bridge claimed the victims — between the ages of 25 and 30 — had committed an April 24 car bombing outside a police station, Mexican media reported.

Hours later, the 14 headless bodies were found in black bags in a gray van parked near a trade association.

The heads were in three ice chests found three hours later.

Nuevo Laredo, on the Texas border, is the site of a vicious feud between the Zeta and Gulf cartels.

Last month, another 14 bodies were found abandoned outside the mayor's office.
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The drug cartels are fighting over access to the I-35 corridor which begins in Laredo and runs up the middle of the United…